TZ is a less popular version of TAR archive. TZ archives allow users to store multiple files in a single data container. TZ are most commonly used in Unix-based systems. A TZ archive can be decompressed with the command "tar -xzvf" executed from the command line.

TZ extension is a combination of TAR and Z extensions. TAR part denotes that the file is a TAR archive and the Z part informs that the archive has been compressed with Z algorithm to save disk space. Combination of TAR and Z was further enhanced by introducing GNUzip compression method and GZ file archives.